Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time offers a theoretical account of the most fundamental kinds of time representation, drawing on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and biology. Recent experimental findings on creatures from bees to scrub-jays to human beings have demonstrated the complex – and astoundingly reliable – functioning of biological clocks. These clocks, Carlos Montemayor argues, make possible representations of duration that are then anchored to representations of simultaneity, and they do so independently of conscious information or representations of the self. Montemayor offers an innovative philosophical explanation of how representations of duration and simultaneity relate to the consciously experienced present moment. No theory has integrated the research on representations of simultaneity and duration. Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time provides such a theory, showing that the metric constraints on time measurements are not dependent on phenomenal consciousness.

"In the welter of today's information tsunami, it is statistically likely that this gem of a contribution will go unnoticed. Any such oversight would be a sad mistake. […] It should be compulsory reading for all "time-smiths" but would not be out of place in an essential reading list for all those entering any form of advanced education, most especially those trying to understand the behavior of living systems in all their manifold complexities. Laudatory encomia for texts are all very well but let me simply say this--I am very glad that I read it, and I wish I had written it." - Peter A. Hancock in KronoScope 14 (2014) pp. 109-112.

Carlos Montemayor, PhD. (2007) Rutgers University, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His interdisciplinary research on the representation of time includes “Time: Biological, Intentional and Cultural” in Time: Limits and Constraints (Brill, 2010).